Tuesday, April 23, 2019

This year marks my 40th year of playing D&D. I started with Holmes Basic and quickly moved to Moldvay Basic when it was released. It is also the 20th anniversary of my "Netbook of Witches & Warlocks". So fairly auspicious anniversaries.

Since this year has been about "Back to Basics" for me I have some books ready to celebrate.

I am pleased to announce the first of three new Witch books for Basic Era Gameplay.

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

My first knowledge of Thomas Denmark was when I picked up a copy of the absolutely fantastic d20 book "Way of the Witch" by Citizen Games. His work is featured throughout the book and on the cover. For me, it really helped define the feel of that book and the classes involved.

Since then I have worked with nearly all the authors of that book and Christina Stiles and Megan Robertson joined me on the Strange Brew d20/Pathfinder project which we all felt was the spiritual successor to Way of the Witch. Sadly Citizen Games was a casualty of the d20 bust.
The text lives on in Strange Brew and the art lives on with Thomas Denmark.

So it was not a big surprise, but a pleasant one all the same, when I saw the art for Isaina Lyd’ar in Beasties II. In fact, I have seen it before.

I was very, very pleased that Thomas could use his art again in his own products. It is too good to let lie forgotten in an out of print book.

It is only fitting then that his "magic-user" should really be a witch in the proper sense. She is 100% Open OGC in Beasties and my The Witch for Swords & Wizardry White Box is as well, so it is a perfect match in my mind.

Isaina has always been an outsider. She would rather talk to animals than humans. When she does make friends she is incredibly loyal and close. She always thinks about how her actions can lead to the greater good, and she believes it is each individuals responsibility to bring more happiness into the world and reduce suffering.

She often has visions and haunting dreams of a coming disaster. She is driven to prevent these from really happening.

She is a bit too enamored with ale, wine, and intoxicants and is occasionally willing to try out new experiences.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Got home last night to a mail call from Mark Taormino. This is always a good time.

The box came with his new adventure module #5 Palace of the Dragon's Princess and some dice in a bag. The dice are actually quite nice.

The box is nice an sturdy.

It holds all five of the Maximum Mayhem adventures and the monster book, Monsters of Mayhem #1. It will also hold a bunch of his characters sheets once I print them out on goldenrod paper and all the extra perks that came with the adventures (posters, 3D art).

There is also enough room in the box for a rule set. While the monsters and adventures are overtly "Advanced" in design (OSRIC, Advanced Labyrinth Lord), the maximum level for the adventures is 14 and that screams B/X to me. I'll have to find the right OSR rules that fits the feeling of these.

You can still get a box while supplies last directly from Dark Wizard.
The adventure modules, monster book, and character sheets can be found at DriveThruRPG/RPGNow.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

The trouble with most "gamer fiction" is you can practically hear the dice being rolled in the background. Sometimes, and it doesn't matter how compelling the story, you can't bu help see or hear game terms being thrown about.
Thankfully that is NOT the issue here with Shadowtide: A Blue Rose Novel by Joseph D. Carriker, Jr.

Carriker gives us a story we can get into and characters we can care about, that is the job of all good storytellers; whether that medium is a novel, a play or a role-playing game. In this case, we get a good novel that preserves what we like or want from the RPG but still satisfies as a novel.

The story opens with the disappearance (likely murder) of two envoys from the Sovereign's Finest. The Sovereign is Queen Jaelin of Aldis and her envoys are tasked with helping out where they can and mostly fighting the forces of evil. The two envoys are tracking down a reported case of Shadow Sorcerery in the Veran Marsh east of Aldis. Shadow is more than just black magic, it is a taint of the unworldly, of the unnatural. Contrasts are turned up in Aldis, the evil are very evil and the good...well the good try to be very good, but as this book reminds us even the Envoys of the Queen, the very symbols of good, have to make hard choices.

The story begins with a trio of envoys. I would say "unlikely" but in truth the envoys are a varied lot. We have Soot who is a Rhy-Crow, or an intelligent crow with the abilities of an Adept. Morjin Brightstar, a lovable rogue and rake who works best alone, but is constantly falling love with whomever he meets. A note. Morjin is a character who in a lesser hand would have been VERY annoying. But Carriker invests a lot of attention and dare I say love into Morjin that you feel for the guy. He is a former Roamer, a nomadic culture similar to the Romany of our world, but he has been exiled from his clan. So it becomes easy to see how his happy-go-lucky, devil-may-care nature hides a profound sadness of what would be a good heart. Finally the last of our trio is Ydah (pronounced EE0dah). She is a Night person, or what might pass for a half-orc in other books. She is the fighter to Morjin's lover. She is also recovering from recent grief and hides her sadness behind a gruff exterior and a desire to beat the living crap out of people. Which she excels at.

The trio finds themselves in a hidden smuggler's town called Serpent's Haven. Where basically everyone is a criminal or descended from a criminal of some sort. Their mission here is to discover what happened to other envoys and figure out what the nature of the Shadow they were looking for.

I don't want to spoil the plot, but suffice to say it involves cults, crazed cultists, a Dark Fiend and the ever-present danger of Shadow to all that are around it, friend and foe alike.

Naturally, comparisons will be made to the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey, of which Blue Rose is inspired by, but those comparisons are mainly superficial here. Sure one can tell a "Valdemar" story with Blue Rose. One could also tell this story with Blue Rose. The differences to me lie at the heart of what Shadowtide and Blue Rose are really about. The characters of both the novel and game try to do Good with a capital G. But often the only choices they have are goods with a little g. They can't fix every problem. The difference I think then between a Blue Rose character and say a D&D character is that it is the good they can't do is what bothers the Blue Rose characters, and this makes them want to do and be better next time.

That is certainly true for our trio of heroes here. Morjin feels bad about how treats certain people when he knows he has worked towards the greater good. Ydah feels bad about having to kill (and kill she does) cultists, but she needs to stop an even greater evil. Soot, well Soot has some problems all his own and shows us how dangerous the cult they are dealing with is.

In the end, the characters care about their actions. They care about how others see them as envoys and they care about how others are treated. They know there is injustice in the world, even Ydah mentions the stares she still gets in "enlightened Aldis", but they are working to make things a little bit better. Because they care they are not the "murder hobos" of other games or stories and we care more for them as well.

The book ends, but room for a sequel is left open. I certainly hope so. The characters are entertaining and the mystery they are delving into is a fascinating one. Kudos to Carriker for giving us characters whose motivations I believe and whose stories are compelling enough to make me want more.

Wednesday, December 5, 2018

I often joke with my wife that I know exactly how I am going to die. It's going to be an M.I. while shoveling snow one winter. Statistically speaking given my age, health, previous heart issues and where I live this is a pretty safe bet. So if I do, you heard it here first.

The trouble is shoveling snow gives me great ideas. Pretty much the entire Winter Witch book came to me while digging out of one Chicago winter.

Foresee Death
The witches of the Winter Witch Tradition have a secret they almost never share with others, not even their sister witches. Everyone knows of course and the secret is still kept.

Each Winter Witch knows exactly how she will die.

She may not know the details, and certainly not where or when but she knows as sure as she knows her own date of birth how she will meet her end. Many know it will be via fire or violence. Rare is the witch that sees herself lying in a bed as a great crone surrounded by loved ones. No. The witch knows her end and she knows it will not be pleasant.
Some occult scholars believe that this is because the Winter Witch, like the Mara Witch, deals with aspects of the divine closer to death. Winter is the month of death, but also of rebirth, the witch then learns how she will die so she may prepare for her own eventual reincarnation and rebirth.

Using Foresee Death in Your Games
For PC Winter Witches the player must jot down how she sees her witch character dying. Emphasis on the dramatic or even maudlin is preferred. The details can and should be light and simple. "I will die in a fire" or "I will die surrounded by my fallen enemies". Something that makes a mental picture. A single scene of death; not a movie.
The Player and the Game Master then should agree on this with the assumption that the character very likely will have a long life ahead of them. Each then takes on certain responsibilities to the character.The GM agrees NOT to create scenes purposefully to kill the witch character. The GM can have fires and enemies and everything that are in the Forsending of Death, but to let the dice fall where they may.The Player agrees to play her character as normal knowing full well that the GM knows the situations of death and could use them.Both agree to the following depending on the system used.

Old School D&D/OSR: The character is given a +3 bonus to any saving throw that might result in death that is NOT of the situation described. If the situation is as described then the character gets a saving throw penalty of -7.

3rd/Pathfinder or 4th Editions: The save mods are the same +3 or -7, but apply to Fortitude saves/defense and Death saves.

5th Edition: The witch or warlock character has Advantage on all Death saves that do not fit the situation described or Disadvantage on all Death saves in situations that do.

If your game does not have Winter Witches then this can extend to other witches or to warlocks as the case merits itself.

The idea here is not to give the character a way to cheat death. Quite the opposite really. It is designed to let the character (and the player) know that death is always there, waiting, like a wolf in the winter. If given the chance it will pounce on you. Knowing this doesn't change it.

It has gotten some people asking if the books are all compatible (they are) and what features each book has to make it "Special". I hope this help clears some of that up.

For starters, yes, there is some overlap. The table of experience points and spells per level are all 100% the same. There some spells in common. For example, the 3rd level spell Bestow Curse appears in multiple books since a curse is so central to the archetype of the witch. There is also a lot new material in each one.

The Witch and Warlock classes (slightly different than the ones above)

New Witch traditions, Craft of the Wise, Tradition of the Magna Mater, Demonic, Faerie and Gypsy.

New Warlock Lodges, The Dark School of the Scholomance, Fraternity of the Bones, Goetic, The Hermetic Lodge and The Secret Masters of the Invisible College.

New Demons, the Calabim, the Shedim, the Lilim, and the Baalseraph.

248 spells

So 17 Witch traditions and 761 total spells!

Currently in the works:

The Winter Witch. the Winter Witch tradition, the Pact of Winter for the Warlock. New monsters and magic items. Lots of new spells. New races

The Black Witch. A B/X dedicated witch, levels 1 to 13. The Black Witch Tradition (no, it's not what you think it is), lots of new spells, new magic items and maybe some monsters. Hags as a playable race.

and finally The Complete Witch a book that combines all these books into one. Maybe...have not decided yet.

Monday, October 22, 2018

Last week I posted a Lulu version of a possible POD for the D&D Basic book; B/X flavor.
I think it went a long way in showing that a Basic book POD is a viable solution.

To further that end, here is a book from roughly the same time period and with a similar scan. The Gamma World boxed set is more of a contemporary with the Holmes D&D boxed set but it is also currently in POD on RPGNow/Drivethru RPG and I got my book in the mail last week.

The cover is the same as the box art. As opposed to the cover of the book inside the box.

All of the box contents are reproduced in the book. Except for adventure and dice.

The text is rather clear and very easy to read. In fact reading through this again today I found things in the rules that I either forgotten about or never knew!

It is in much better shape than my old GW book.

The PODs from WotC/DriveThru keep getting better and better. So there is a reasonable expectation that a Basic set POD will look much better than my 15-minute effort.

Looking forward to seeing more PODs from Wizards/DriveThru and hopefully, Basic/Expert D&D will be part of that!

Monday, October 15, 2018

Part of that discussion was how viable are the current PDFs for POD printing. You can see some of that discussion on the Basic D&D DriveThruRPG page (linked above). Others began to wonder how difficult would it be to do?

Well everyone knows what a huge fan I am of B/X D&D so I thought I would give it a go.
I grabbed my PDF of Basic D&D and set a 10-minute time limit. If I didn't have a book ready to go by then I would pack it up and go home from work. It took me 15 minutes.

I fired up Adobe Suite and took apart the PDF to put back together on the Printer's website.

Today I got the results in the mail.

As you can see no one will mistake these for the real deal. For starters there are no table of contents nor index.

While the newer one has whiter pages and clear text, the cover is not really the best.

Could I make a better one? Sure. Given time and effort in Photoshop and Acrobat. But I won't. For starters the book, while not really expensive, was costlier than say buying a print copy of Basic Fantasy and I get more in that. There are other, cheaper options as well.

No this served the purpose I wanted well; could the current PDF make a passible POD. The answer is Yes, with some work. Now I have another table copy of D&D Basic and that is never a bad thing.

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

“It begins with absence and desire.It begins with blood and fear.It begins with a discovery of witches.”
- Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

I read Deborah Harkness' "A Discovery of Witches" a bit back. I kept debating on whether or not to stop reading it many times.

Somethings about the book rubbed me wrong. While I can appreciate the scholarship that went into this book there were some things that just bugged me.
Diana Bishop, our protagonist, is supposed to be a smart, independent woman. She is a Ph.D. and overtly a feminist. So why does she keep falling for the dry as old paint vampire?
The story has an interesting quest, the search for an alchemical text that might have something to do with all creatures (vampires and witches). They run all over the world and do a lot of research.
I stuck through it till the end, since I think there was an interesting mystery in there with some fairly unitesting characters in my mind.
In the end I wanted to like it more than I did, but I did read the next one in the series too. More that one later.

2018 Witch & Witchcraft Reading ChallengeBooks Read so far: 3Level: InitiateWitches in this book: Dozens, more impliedAre they Good Witches or Bad Witches: Good for the most part, but some evil.Best RPG to Emulate it: I get a New World of Darkness vibe here.